Robert Louis Stevenson 



THE DRAMATIST 



\ ' 



BY 



ARTHUR WING PINERO 



THE CRITIC company 

27 and 29 West Twenty-third Street 

NEW YORK 

1903 



Robert Louis Stevenson 



THE DRAMATIST 



BY 

ARTHUR WING PINERO 



THE CRITIC COMPANY 

7 and 29 West Twenty-third Street 
NEW YORK 
1903 






THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

FEB 27 1903 

Copynght Entry 

CLASS cc- XXo. No. 

COPY 8. 



COPYRIGHT, 1903 

By the critic COMPANY 



ITbe Iknlcherbocher ffitcess, IRew l!)orh 



Robert Louis Stevenson: The Dramatist 



By ARTHUR WING PINERO 



Some, perhaps — and some, too, who 
would call theiTiselves ardent Steven- 
sonians — arc scarcely aware that Robert 
Louis Stevenson was a dramatist at all, 
that he ever essayed the dramatic form. 
If I were to ask those who have read 
his three plays to hold up a hand, I fear 
the demonstration would not be a very 
considerable one; and that demonstra- 
tion would be still less imposing, I 
think, if my question were to take this 
shape: "How many of you have seen 
one or other of these works upon the 
stage?" Yet it is a fact that Steven- 
son wrote, or at any rate actively col- 
laborated in, three plays. Three plays? 
More — four, five. But two of the five 
I propose to disregard entirely. One, 
"The Hanging Judge," written in col- 
laboration with Mrs. Stevenson, has 
never been published, and may there- 
fore be regarded as exempt from criti- 
cism. ^lle other, " Macaire," does not 
profess to be an original work except 
in details of dialogue. We will, there- 
fore, with your permission, put that, 
also, aside and concentrate our atten- 
tion on the three original plays — ' ' Dea- 
con Brodie," "Beau Austin," and 
"Admiral Guinea" — which Stevenson 
produced in collaboration with Mr. 
William Ernest Henley. Now, I wish 
to enquire why it is that these two 
men, both, in their different ways, of 
distinguished talent, combining, with 
great gusto and hopefulness, to produce 
acting dramas, should have made such 
small mark with them, either on or off 
the stage. "Deacon Brodie" was acted 
a good many times in America, but only 
once, I believe, in Great Britain. "Beau 
Austin " has been publicly presented 
some score of times ; "Admiral Guinea" 
has enjoyed but a single performance" 
Nor have these pieces produced a much 
geater effect in the study, as the phrase 
goes. They have their admiiers, of 
whom, in many respects, I am one. I 
hope to draw your attention, before we 
part this evening — if you will allow me 
to do so — to some of the sterling beau- 



ties they contain, liut no one, 1 think, 
gives even "Beau Austin " a veiy high 
place among Stevenson's works as a 
whole; and inany people who have 
probably read every other line that Ste- 
venson wrote, have, as I say, scarcely 
realized the existence of his dramas. 
Why should Stevenson the dramatist 
take such a back seat, if you will par- 
don the expression, in comparison with 
Stevenson the novelist, tlie essayist, 
the poet? 

This question seems to me all the 
more worth asking because Stevenson's 
case is by no means a singular one. 
There is hardly a novelist or poet of 
the whole nineteenth century who does 
not stand in exactly the same position. 
They have one and all attempted to 
write for the stage, and it is scarcely 
too much to say that they have one 
and all failed, not only to achieve the- 
atrical success but even, in any appre- 
ciable degree, to enrich our dramatic 
literature. Some people, perhaps, will 
claim Shelley and Browning as excep- 
tions. Well, I won't attempt to argue 
the point — I will content myself with 
asking you what rank Shelley would 
have held among our poets had he 
written nothing but "The Cenci," or 
Browning if his fame rested solely on 
''Strafford" and "A Blot on the 'Scutch- 
eon. For the rest, Scott, Coleridge, 
Wordsworth, Keats, all produced dra- 
mas of a more or less abortive kind. 
Some of Byron s plays, which he justly 
declared to be unsuited for the stage, 
were forced by fine acting and elaborate 
scenic embellishment into a sort of suc- 
cess; but how dead they are to-day! 
and how low a place they hold among 
the poet's works! Dickens and Thack- 
eray both loved the theatre, and both 
wrote for it without thcsmallest success. 
Of Lord Tennyson's plaj's. two, "The 
Cup" and "Becket," in the second of 
which Sir Henry Irving has given us 
one of his noblest performances, were 
so admirably mounted and rendered by 
that great actor that they enjoyed con. 



The Critic 



siderable prosperity in the theatre; but 
no critic ever dreamt of assigning either 
to them or to any other of Tennyson's 
dramas a place coequal with his non- 
dramatic poems. Mr. Swinburne has 
written many plays — has any one of 
them the smallest chance of being re- 
membered along with ' ' Poems and Bal- 
lads " and "Songs before Sunrise"? 
Ther is only one exception to the rule 
that during the nineteenth century no 
poet or novelist of the slightest emi- 
nence made any success upon the stage, 
and even that solitary exception is a 
dubious one. I refer, as you may sur- 
mise, to Bulwer Lytton. There is no 
doubt as to his success; but what does 
the twentieth century think of his 
eminence? 

If we can lay our finger on the reason 
of Stevenson's — I will not say failure, 
but inadequate success — as a play- 
wright, perhaps it may help us to 
understand the still more inadequate 
success of greater men. 

And here let me follow the example 
of that agreeable essayist, Euclid, and 
formulate my theorem in advance — or, 
in other words, indicate the point to- 
wards which I hope to lead you. We 
shall find, I think, that Stevenson, with 
all his genius, failed to realize that the 
art of drama is not stationary, but pro- 
gressive. By this I do not mean that 
it is always improving; what I do mean 
is that its conditions are always chang- 
ing, and that every dramatist whose 
ambition it is to produce live plays is 
absolutely bound to study carefully, 
and I may even add respectfully — at 
any rate not contemptuously — the con- 
ditions that hold good for his own age 
and generation. This Stevenson did 
not — would not — do. We shall find, I 
think, that in all his plays he was de- 
liberately imitating outworn models, 
and doing it, too, in a sportive, half- 
disdainful spirit, as who should say, 
"The stage is a realm of absurdities — 
come, let us be cleverly absurd!" In 
that spirit, ladies and gentlemen, suc- 
cess never was and never will be at- 
tained. I do not mean to imply, of 
course, that this was the spirit in which 
the other great writers I have men- 
tioned — Shelley, Browning, Tennyson, 



and the rest — approached their work as 
dramatists. But I do suggest that 
they one and all, like Stevenson, set 
themselves to imitate outworn models, 
instead of discovering for themselves, 
and if necessary ennobling, the style 
of drama really adapted to the dra- 
matist's one great end — that of show- 
ing the age and body of the time his 
form and pressure. The difference is 
that while Stevenson imitated the 
transpontine plays of the early nine- 
teenth century, most of the other 
writers I have named imitated the 
Elizabethan dramatists. The difTer- 
ence is not essential to my point — the 
error lies in the mere fact of imitation. 
One of the great rules — perhaps the 
only universal rule — of the drama is 
that you cannot pour new wine into old 
skins. 

Some of the great men I have men- 
tioned were debarred from success for 
a reason which is still more simple and 
obvious — namely, that they had no 
dramatic talent. But this was not 
Stevenson's case. No one can doubt 
that he had in him the ingredients of a 
dramatist. What is dramatic talent? 
Is it not the power to project charac- 
ters, and to cause them to tell an inter- 
esting story through the medium of 
dialogue? This is dramatic talent; 
and dramatic talent, if I may so ex- 
press it, is the raw material of theatrical 
talent. Dramatic, like poetic, talent 
is born, not made; if it is to achieve 
success on the stage, it must be de- 
veloped into theatrical talent by hard 
study, and generally by long practice. 
For theatrical talent consists in the 
power of making your characters not 
only tell a story by means of dialogue, 
but tell it in such skilfully devised foim 
and order as shall, within the limits of 
an ordinary theatrical representation, 
give rise to the greatest possible amount 
of that peculiar kind of emotional ef- 
fect, the production of which is the one 
great function of the theatre. Now, 
dramatic talent Stevenson undoubtedly 
possessed in abundance; and I am con- 
vinced that theatrical talent was well 
within his reach, if only he had put 
himself to the pains of evolving it. 

Need I prove the dramatic talent of 



Robert Louis Stevenson : The Dramatist 



the author of "Prince Otto," "The 
Master of Ballantrae," "The Ebb- 
Tide," and "Weir of Hermiston "? If 
I once began reading scenes to demon- 
strate it, I should not know where to 
leave off. I prefer, then, to read you, 
not any single scene, but a whole 
draina which, as Stevenson assures us 
in his "Chapter on Dreams," came to 
him in the visions of the night. He is 
showing how his Little People — his 
Brownies, as he calls them ; the Brow- 
nies of the brain — go on working in 
sleep, independently of the dreamer's 
volition, and how in his case they 
would sometimes hit upon strange 
felicities. 

This dreamer [he says — and by "this dreamer" 
he means himself] — this dreamer has encountered 
some trifling vicissitudes of fortune. When the 
bank begins to send letters and the butcher to linger 
at the back gate, he sets to belaboring his brains 
after a story, for that is his readiest money-winner ; 
and, behold! at once the Little People begin to be- 
stir themselves in the same quest, and labor all 
night long, and all night long set before him trun- 
cheons of tales upon their lighted theatre. 
How often have these sleepless Brownies done him 
honest service, andfgiven him, as he sat idly taking 
his pleasure in the boxes, better tales than he could 
fashion for himself. Here is one, exactly as it 
came to him. It seemed he was the son of a very 
rich and wicked man, the owner of broad acres and 
a most damnable temper. The dreamer (and that 
was the son) had lived much abroad, on purpose to 
avoid his parent ; and vi'hen 'at length he returned 
to England, it was to find him married again to a 
young wife, who was supposed to suffer cruelly and 
to loathe her yoke. Because of this marriage (as 
the dreamer indistinctly understood) it was desirable 
for father and son to have a meeting ; and yet both 
being proud and both angry, neither would conde- 
scend upon a visit. Meet they did accordingly, in 
a desolate, sandy country by the sea ; and there 
they quarrelled, and the son, stung by some intoler- 
able insult, struck down the father dead. No sus- 
picion was aroused ; the dead man was found and 
buried, and the dreamer succeeded to the broad 
estates, and found himself installed under the same 
roof with his father's widow, for whom no provision 
had been made. These two lived very much alone, 
as people may after a bereavement, sat down to 
table together, shared the long evenings, and grew 
daily better friends ; until it seemed to him of a 
sudden that she was prying about dangerous mat- 
ters ; that she had conceived a notion of his guilt ; 
that she watched him and tried him with questions. 



He drew back from her company as men draw back 
from a precipice suddenly discovered ; and yet so 
strong was the attraction tliat he would drift again 
and again into the old intimacy, and again and 
again be startled back by some suggestive question 
or some inexplicable meaning in her eye. So they 
lived at cross-purposes, a life full of broken dia- 
logue, challenging glances, and suppressed passion ; 
until, one day, he saw the woman slipping from the 
house in a veil, followed her to the station, followed 
her in the train to the seaside country, and out over 
the sand-hills to the very place where the murder 
was done. There she began to grope among the 
bents, he watching her, flat upon his face ; and 
presently she had something in her hand — I cannot 
remember what it was, but it was deadly evidence 
against the dreamer — and as she held it up to look 
at it, perhaps from the shock of the discovery, her 
foot slipped, and she hung at some peril on the 
brink of the tall sandwreaths. He had no thought 
but to spring up and rescue her ; and there they 
stood face to face, she with thatdeadly matter openly 
in her hand — his very presence on the spot another 
link of proof. It was plain she was about to speak, 
but this was more than he could bear — he could 
bear to be lost, but not to talk of it with his de- 
stroyer ; and he cut her short with trivial conversa- 
tion. Arm in arm, they returned together to the 
train, talking he knew not what, made the journey 
back in the same carriage, sat down to dinner, and 
passed the evening in the drawing-room as in the 
past. But suspense and fear drummed in the 
dreamer's bosom. "She has not denounced me 
yet" — so his thoughts ran: "when will she de- 
nounce me? Will it be to-morrow?" And it was 
not to-morrow, nor the next day, nor the next ; and 
their life settled back on the old terms, only that 
she seemed kinder than before, and that, as for 
him, the burthen of his suspense and wonder grew 
daily more unbearable, so that he wasted away like 
a man with a disease. Once, indeed, he broke all 
bounds of decency, seized an occasion when she 
was abroad, ransacked her room, and at last, hidden 
among her jewels, found the damning evidence. 
There he stood, holding this thing, which was his 
life, in the hollow of his hand, and marvelling at 
her inconsequent behavior, — that she should seek, 
and keep, and yet not use it ; and then the door 
opened, and behold herself ! So, once more, they 
stood, eye to eye, with the evidence Ijetween them ; 
and once more she raised to him a face brimming 
with some communication ; and once more he shied 
away from speech and cut her ofT. But before he 
left the room, which he had turned upside-down, 
he laid back his death-warrant where he had found 
it ; and, at that, her face lighted up. The next 
thingjie heard, she was explaining to her maid, 
with some ingenious falsehood, the disorder of her 



The Critic 



things. Flesh and blood could bear the strain no 
longer ; and I think it was the next morning (though 
chronology is always hazy in the theatre of the 
mind) that he burst from his reserve. They had 
been breakfasting together in one corner of a great, 
parqueted, sparely furnished room of many win- 
dows ; all the time of the meal she had tortured 
him with sly allusions ; and no sooner were the 
servants gone, and these two protagonists] alone to- 
gether, than he leaped to his feet. She, too, sprang 
up, with a pale face ; with a pale face she heard 
him as he raved out his complaint : Why did she 
torture him so? she knew all, she knew he was no 
enemy to her ; why did she not denounce him at 
once? what signified her whole behavior? why did 
she torture him? and yet again, why did she torture 
him? And when he had done, she fell upon her 
knees, and with outstretched hands : " Do you not 
understand?" she cried. " I love you! " 

An intensely dramatic tale, I venture 
to think, ladies and gentlemen ! one 
perhaps calculated to shock those who 
deny to dramatic art the right — in the 
words of Browning — "to paint man 
man, whatever the issue"; neverthe- 
less, an intensely dramatic tale. Mow, 
we will not enquire whether we are 
bound to believe that this highly dra- 
matic story actually came to Stevenson 
in a dream. No doubt he believed 
that it did; but perhaps, like ordinary 
mortals, he unconsciously touched up 
the dream in the telling, and touched 
it up with the vivacity of genius. But 
that is nothing to our purpose. It is 
certain that in one way or another, 
whether in his sleeping or his waking 
moments, the drama I have just re- 
counted to you came into, and came 
out of, Stevenson's brain; and I fancy 
you will agree with me that a finer dra- 
matic conception has seldom come out 
of any brain. Now mark what is his 
own comment upon it. Having fin- 
ished the tale, he proceeds: "Here- 
upon, with a pang of wonder and 
mercantile delight, the dreamer awoke. 
His mercantile delight was not of long 
endurance; for it soon became plain 
that in this^spirited tale there were un- 
marketable elements; which is just the 
reason why you have it here so briefly 
told." I will ask you, ladies and 
gentlemen, to bear in mind this "mer- 
cantile delight," this abandonment of 
the theme because of its "unmarket- 



able elements." To these points wc 
will return later on. Meanwhile the 
extract I have so lamely recited has, I 
hope, served its purpose in enabling 
you to realize beyond all question that 
Stevenson had in him a large measure 
of dramatic talent — what I have called 
the ingredients, the makings, of a 
dramatist. 

Now let me revive in your memory 
another of Stevenson's essaj's which 
throws a curious light upon his mental 
attitude towards the theatre. I refer 
to that delightful essay in "Memories 
and Portraits" called "A Penny Plain 
and Twopence Colored." It describes, 
as many of you will remember, his 
juvenile delight in those sheets of toy- 
theatre characters which, even when he 
wrote, had "become, for the most part, 
a memory," and are now, I believe, al- 
most extinct. 

I have at different times [he says] possessed 
"Aladdin," "The Red Rover," "The Blind 
Boy," "The Old Oak Chest," "The Wood 
Demon." "Jack Sheppard," " The Miller and his 
Men," " The Smuggler," " The Forest of Bondy," 
" Robin Hood," and " Three-Fingered Jack, the 
Terror of Jamaica " ; and I have assisted others in 
the illumination of " The Maid of the Inn," and 
" The Battle of Waterloo." 

Then he tells how, in a window in 
Leith Walk, all the year round, 

there stood displayed a theatre in working order, 
with a " forest set," a " combat," and a few " rob- 
bers carousing " in the slides ; and below and about, 
tenfold dearer to me ! the plays themselves, those 
budgets of romance, lay tumbled one upon another. 
Long and often have I lingered there with empty 
pockets. One figure, we shall say, was visible in 
the first plate of characters, bearded, pistol in hand, 
or drawing to his ear the cloth-yard arrow : I would 
spell the name : was it Macaire 

one of the subjects, you see, which he 
afterwards chose for stage treatment 



or Long Tom Coffin, or Grindoff, 2d dress? O, 
how I would long to see the rest ! how — if the 
name by chance were hidden — I would wonder in 
what play he figured, and what immortal legend 
justified his attitude and strange apparel ! 

He then goes on to describe the joy 



Robert l.ouis Stevenson : The Dramatist 



that attended the coloring of the 
"penny plain " plates 

nor can I quite forgive [he says] that child who, 
wilfully foregoing pleasure, stoops to "twopence 
colored." With crimson lake (hark to the sound of 
it — crimson lake ! — the horns of elfland are not 
richer on the ear) — with crimson lake and Prussian 
blue a certain -purple is to be compounded which, 
for cloaks especially, Titian could not equal. The 
latter color with gamboge, a hated name, though an 
exquisite pigment, supplied a green of such savory 
greenness that to-day my heart regrets it. Nor can 
I recall without a tender weakness the very aspect 
of the water where I dipped my brush. 

All this is delightful — is it not? — de- 
liciously and admirably Stevensonian. 
The unfortunate thing is that even to 
his dying day he continued to regard 
the actual theatre as only an enlarged 
form of the toy theatres which had 
fascinated his childhood, he continued 
to use in his dramatic coloring the 
crimson lake and Prussian blue of trans- 
pontine romance; he considered his 
function as a dramatist very little more 
serious than that child's-play with 
paint-box and pasteboard on which his 
memory dwelt so fondly. He played 
at being a playwright; and, ladies and 
gentleman, he was fundamentally in 
error in regarding the draina as a mat- 
ter of child's-play. 

Observe, too, that these dramas of 
the toy theatre were, before they 
reached the toy theatre, designed for 
almost the lowest class of theatrical 
audiences. They were stark and star- 
ing melodramas. Most of them were 
transpontine in the literal sense of the 
word — that is to say, they had originally 
seen the light at the humbler theatres 
beyond the bridges — the Surrey and 
the Coburg. Many of them were un- 
acknowledged adaptations from the 
French^for in the early years of the 
nineteenth century the English dra- 
matist had not acquired that nice con- 
scientiousness which he has since 
displayed. Yet a drama which was 
sufficiently popular to be transferred 
to the toy theatres was almost certain 
to have a sort of rude merit in its con- 
struction. The characterization would 
be hopelessly conventional, the dia- 
logue bald and despicable — but the 



situations would be artfully arranged, 
the story told adroitly and with spirit. 
Unfortunately these merits did not 
come within Stevenson's ken. I don't 
know whether any one could have dis- 
covered them in the text-books issued 
with the sheets of characters; he, at 
any rate, did not, for he tells us so. 
"The fable," he says, "as set forth in 
the play-book, proved to be not worthy 
of the scenes and characters. 
Indeed, as literature, these dramas did 
not much appeal to me. I forget the 
very outline of the plots." In other 
words, what little merit there was in 
the plays escaped him. What he re- 
membered and delighted in was simply 
their absurdities — the crude inconsis- 
tencies of their characters, the puerili- 
ties of their technique. But here we 
must distinguish. There are two parts 
of technique, which I may perhaps call 
its strategy and its tactics. In strategy 
— -in the general laying out of a play, 
these transpontine dramatists were 
often, as I have said, more than toler- 
ably skilful : but in tactics, in the art of 
getting their characters on and off the 
stage, of conveying information to the 
audience, and so forth, they were al- 
most incredibly careless and conven- 
tional. They would make a man, as 
in the Chinese theatre, tell the whole 
story of his life in a soliloquy; or they 
would expound their plot to the audi- 
ence in pages of conversation between 
characters who acquaint each other 
with nothing that is not already per- 
fectly well known to both. Well, his 
childish studies accustomed Stevenson 
to the miserable tactics of these plays. 
Keenly as he afterwards realized their 
absurdities, he had nevertheless in a 
measure become inured to them. For 
the merits of their strategy, on the 
other hand, he had naturally, as a mere 
child, no eye whatever. And one main 
reason of his inadequate success as a 
dramatist was that he never either un- 
learned their tactics or learned their 
strategy. Had he ever thoroughly 
understood what was good in them, I 
have no doubt that, on the basis of 
this rough-and-ready melodramatic 
technique, he would have"developed a 
technique of his own as admirable as 



The Critic 



that which he ultimately achieved in 
fiction. 

When he first attempts drama, what 
is the theme he chooses? A story of 
crime, a story of housebreaking, dark 
lanterns, jemmies, centre-bits, masks, 
detectives, boozing-kens — in short a 
melodrama of the deepest dye, exactly 
after the Surrey, the Coburg, the toy- 
theatre type. It evidently pleased him 
to think that he could put fresh life 
into this old and puerile form, as he had 
put, or was soon to put, fresh life into 
the boy's tale of adventure. And he 
did, indeed, write a good deal of viva- 
cious dialogue — the literary quality of 
the play, though poor in comparison 
with Stevenson's best work, is, of 
course, incomparably better than that 
of the models on which he was founding. 
But unfortunately it shows no glimmer 
of their stagecraft. The drama is en- 
titled, you remember, "Deacon Brodie, 
or The Double Life," Its hero is a 
historical character who held a position 
of high respectability in eighteenth- 
century Edinburgh while he devoted 
his leisure moments to the science and 
art of burglary. Here was a theme in 
which Fitzball, or any of the Coburg 
melodramatists, would indeed have 
revelled, a theme almost as fertile of 
melodramatic possibilities as that of 
"Sweeny Todd, the Barber of Fleet 
Street. " And one would have thought 
that the future author of "Dr. Jekyll 
and Mr. Hyde" was precisely the 
man to get its full effect out of the 
"double life" of his burglar hero. But 
not a bit of it. From sheer lack of 
stagecraft, the effect of the "double 
life" is wholly lost. Brodie is a patent, 
almost undisguised, scoundrel through- 
out. There is no contrast between the 
respectable and the criminal sides of 
his life, no gradual unmasking of his 
depravity, no piling up, atom by atom, 
of evidence against him. Our wonder 
from the first is that any one should 
ever have regarded him as anything 
else than the poor blustering, blunder- 
ing villain he is. From the total in- 
efTectiveness of the character, one 
cannot but imagine that Stevenson 
was hampered by the idea of represent- 
ing strictly the historical personage. 



In this, for aught I know, he may have 
succeeded; but he has certainly not 
succeeded in making his protagonist 
interesting in the theatre, or in telling 
the story so as to extract one tithe of 
its possibilities of dramatic effect. As 
for his technique, let one specimen 
sufifice. I will read you one of the many 
soliloquies: the faulty method of con- 
ducting action and revealing character 
by soliloquy was one from which Ste- 
venson could never emancipate himself. 
It is a speech delivered by Deacon 
Brodie while he is making preparations 
for a midnight gambling excursion. 

{Brodie closes, locks, and double-bolts the doors of 
his bedroom.) 

Now for one of the Deacon's headaches ! Rogues 
all, rogues all ! {He goes to the clothes-press and 
proceeds to change his coat.) On with the new coat, 
and into the new life ! Down with the Deacon and 
up with the robber ! Eh, God ! how still the house 
is ! There 's something in hypocrisy after all. If 
we were as good as we seem, what would the world 
be? The city has its vizard on, and we — at night 
we are our naked selves. Trysts are keeping, bot- 
tles cracking, knives are stripping ; and here is 
Deacon Brodie flaming forth the man of men he is ! 
How still it is ! . . . My father and Mary — 
Well ! the day for them, the night for me ; the 
grimy, cynical night that makes all cats grey, and all 
honesties of one complexion. Shall a man not have 
half a life of his own ? not eight hours out of twenty- 
four ? Eight shall he have should he dare the pit 
of Tophet. Where 's the blunt ? I must be cool 
to-night, or . . . steady, Deacon, you must win, 
damn you, you must ? You must win back the 
dowry that you 've stolen, and marry your sister, 
and pay your delits, and gull the world a little 
longer ! The Deacon 's going to bed — the poor 
sick Deacon ! Allans ! Only the stars to see me ! 
I'm a man once more till morning. 

But it is needless to dwell long on 
"Deacon Brodie" — ripeness of stage- 
craft is not to be looked for in a first 
attempt, a prentice piece. The play 
is chiefly interesting as exemplifying 
the boyish spirit of gleeful bravado in 
which Stevenson approached the stage. 
Again I say his instinct was to play 
with it, as he had played, when a boy, 
with his pasteboard theatre. In "Ad- 
miral Guinea" — a much better drama 
— the influence of his penny-plain- 
twopence-coloured studies is, if pos- 



Robert Louis Stevenson: The Dramatist 



sible, still more apparent. "Deacon 
Brodie " was the melodrama of crime; 
this was to be the nautical melodrama. 
As the one belonged to the school of 
"Sweeny Todd," so the other was to 
follow in the wake of "Hlack-Ey'd 
Susan," "The Red Rover," "Ren 
Backstay," and those other romances 
of the briny deep in which that cele- 
brated impersonator of seafaring types, 
T. P. Cooke, had made its fame. If 
you require a proof of the intimate re- 
lation between "Admiral Guinea" and 
"Skelt's Juvenile Drama," as the toy- 
theatre plays were called, let me draw 
your attention to this little coincidence. 
In his essay on the Juvenile Drama, 
Stevenson enlarges not only on the 
sheets of characters, but also on the 
scenery which accompanied them. 

Here is the cottage interior [he writes], the usual 
first flat, with the cloak upon the nail, the rosaries 
of onions, the gun and powder-horn and corner cup- 
board ; here is the inn — (this drama must be 
nautical, I foresee Captain LuiT and Bold Bob 
Bowsprit) — here is the inn with the red curtains, 
pipes, spittoons, and eight-day clock. 

Well now, the two scenes of "Admiral 
Guinea " reproduce, with a little elabo- 
ration, exactly the two scenes here 
sketched. The first is the cottage in- 
terior with the corner cupboard; the 
second is thus described : 

the stage represents the parlor of the Admiral Ben- 
bow inn. Fireplace right, with high-backed settles 
on each side. . . . Tables left, with glasses, 
pipes, etc. . . . window with red half-curtains ; 
spittoons ; candles on both the front tables. 

Here, you see, he draws in every de- 
tail upon his memories of the toy- 
theatre. And in writing the play his 
effort was constantly, and one may al- 
most say confessedly, to reproduce the 
atmosphere of conventional nautical 
melodrama — to rehandle its material, 
while replacing its bald language with 
dialogue of high literary merit. And 
of course he succeeded in writing many 
speeches of great beauty. Take this 
for instance. It is the scene in the first 
act between John Gaunt— called "Ad- 
miral Guinea" — Kit French, a pri- 
vateersman, and Gaunt's daughter Ar- 



ethusa. Arcthusa, you will remem- 
ber, is the pretty, virtuous maiden of 
nautical melodrama: Kit, the careless, 
harem-scarem young sea-dog in love 
with the virtuous maiden, and desirous, 
in his weak way, of casting his reckless 
habits behind him and of becoming a 
respectable and respected coasting 
skipper. Gaunt, a vigorously drawn 
character, was once, I may remind you, 
captain of a slaver but is no an altered 
man, harsh, pious, repentant. Gaunt, 
entering his room, surprises Kit French 
and his daughter together. 

Kit, standing beside Arethusa, her 
hand in his, says to the father, "Cap- 
tain Gaunt, I have come to ask you for 
your daughter." The old man sinks 
into his chair with a growl. 

I love her [says Kit], and she loves me, sir. I 've 
left the privateering. I 've enough to set me up 
and buy a tidy sloop — Jack Lee's; you know the 
boat. Captain ; clinker built, not four years old, 
eighty tons burthen, steers like a child. I 've put 
my mother's ring on Arethusa's finger ; and if you '11 
give us your blessing, I '11 engage to turn over a new 
leaf, and make her a good husband. 

Gaunt. 
In whose strength, Christopher French? 

Kit. 

In the strength of my good, honest love for her : 
as you did for her mother, and my father for miiie. 
And you know, Captain, a man can't command the 
wind : but (excuse me, sir) he can always lie the 
best course possible, and that 's what I '11 do, so 
God help me. 

Gaunt. 

Arethusa, you at least are the child of many 
prayers ; your eyes have been unsealed ; and to you 
the world stands naked, a morning watch for dura- 
tion, a thing spun of cobwebs for solidity. In the 
presence of an angry God, I ask you : have you 
heard this man ? 

Arethusa. 

Father, I know Kit, and I love him. 



I say it solemnly, this is no Christian union. To 
you, Christopher French, I will speak nothing of 
eternal truths : I will speak to you the language of 
this world. You have been trained among sinners 
who gloried in their sin : in your whole life you 
never saved one farthing ; and now, when your 
pockets are full, you think you can begin, poor 
dupe, in your own strength. You are a roysterer, a 



lO 



-.'l il 



The Critic 



jovial companion ; you mean no harm — you are no- 
body's enemy but your own. No doubt you tell 
this girl of mine, and no doubt you tell yourself, 
that you can change. Christopher, speaking under 
correction, I defy you! You ask me for this child 
of many supplications, for this brand plucked from 
the burning : I look at you : I read you through and 
through ; and I tell you — no! 

Kit. 
Captain Gaunt, if you mean that I am not worthy 
of her, I 'm the first to say so. r.ut, if you '11 ex- 
cuse me, sir, I 'm a young man, and young men are 
no better 'n they ought to be ; it 's known ; they 're 
all like that ; and what 's their chance? To be 
married to a girl like this! And would you refuse 
it to me ? Why, sir, you yourself, when you came 
courting, you were young and rough ; and yet I '11 
make bold to say that Mrs. Gaunt was a happy 
woman, and the saving of yourself into the bargain. 
Well, now. Captain Gaunt, will you deny another 
man, and that man a sailor, the very salvation that 
you had yourself ? 

Gaunt. 

Salvation, Christopher French, is from above. 

Kit. 
Well, sir, that is so ; but there 's means, too ; 
and what means so strong as the wife a man has to 
strive and toil for, and that bears the punishment 
whenever he goes wrong ? Now, sir, I 've spoke 
with your old shipmates in the Guinea trade. Hard 
as nails, they said, and true as the compass ; as 
rough as a slaver but as just as a judge. Well, sir, 
you hear me plead : I ask you for my chance ; don't 
you deny it to me. 

Gaunt. 

You speak ofme ? In the true'^balances we both 
weigh nothing. But two things I know : the death 
of iniquity, how foul it is ; and the agony with 
which a man repents. Not until seven devils were 
cast out of me did I awake ; each rent me as it 
passed. Ay, that was repentance. Christopher, 
Christopher, you have sailed before the wind since 
first you weighed your anchor, and now you think 
to sail upon a bowline ? You do not know your 
ship, young man : you will go to le'ward like a sheet 
of paper ; I tell you so that know — I tell you so 
that have tried, and failed, and wrestled in the 
sweat of prayer, and at last, at last, have tasted 
grace. But, meanwhile, no flesh and blood of mine 
shall lie at the "mercy of such a wretch as I was 
then, or as you are this day. I could not own the 
deed before the face of heaven, if I sanctioned this 
unequal yoke. Arethusa, pluck off that ring from 
off your finger! Christopher French, take it, and 
go hence! 



Kit. 

Arethusa, what do you say? 
Arethusa. 

O Kit, you know my heart. But he is alone, and 
I am his only comfort ; and I owe all to him ; and 
shall I not obey my father? But, Kit, if you will 
let me, I will keep your ring. Go, Kit ; go, and 
prove to my father that he was mistaken ; go and 
win me. And O, Kit, if ever you should weary, 
come to me — no, do not come! but send word — and 
I shall know all, and you shall have your ring. 

Kit. 
Don't say that, don't say such things to me ; I 
sink or swim with you. Old man, you 've struck 
me hard ; give me a good word to go with. Name 
your time ; I '11 stand the test. Give me a spark 
of hope, and I '11 fight through for it. .Say just 
this, — " Prove I was mistaken," — and, by George! 
I '11 prove it. 

Gaunt. 
{Looking up.) I make no such compacts. Go, 
and swear not at all. 

Again, take the scene between David 
Pew, the ruffianly blind beggar, once 
Boatswain of ihe Arethusa, who, armed 
with the knowledge of Gaunt's past, 
comes to his old captain to extort 
money from him. They stand face to 
face. "Well?" says Gaunt. "Well, 
Cap'n?" says Pew. "What do you 
want?" asks Gaunt. 

Pew. 

Well, Admiral, in a general way, what I want in 
a manner of speaking is money and rum. 

Gaunt. 

David Pew, I have known you a long time. 
Pew. 

And so you have ; aboard the old Arethusa ; and 
you don't seem that cheered up as I 'd look for, with 
an old shipmate dropping in, one as has been seek- 
ing you two years and more — and blind at that. 
What a swaller you had for a pannikin of rum, and 
what a fist for the shiners ! Ah, Cap'n, they did n't 
call you Admiral Guinea for nothing. I can see 
that old sea-chest of yours — her with tlie brass 
bands, where you kept your gold-dust and doub- 
loons : you know ! — I can see her as well this 
minute as though you and me was still at it play- 
ing put on the lid of her. . . . You don't say 
nothing, Cap'n ? . . . Well, here it is : I want 
money and I want rum. You don't know what it 
is to want rum, you don't : it gets to that p'int, 
that you would kill a 'ole ship's company for just 



Robert Louis Stevenson : The Dramatist 



1 1 



one guttle of it. What? Admiral Guinea, my old 
Commander, go back on poor old Few ? and him 

high and dry ? 

Gaunt. 
David Pew, it were better for you lliat you were 
sunk in fifty fathom. I know your life ; and first 
and last, it is one broadside of wickedness. Vou 
were a porter in a school, and beat a boy to dealli ; 
you ran for it, turned slaver, and .shipped witli me, 
a green hand. Ay, that was the craft for you : that 
was the right craft, and I was the right captain ; 
there was none worse that sailed to Guinea. Well, 
what came of that? In five years' time you made 
yourself the terror and abhorrence of your mess- 
mates. The worst hands detested you ; your cap- 
tain — that was me, John Gaunt, the chief of sinners 
— cast you out for a Jonali. Ay, you were a scan- 
dal to the Guinea coast, from I.agos down to 
Calabar ; and when at last I sent you ashore, a 
marooned man — your shipmates, devils as they 
were, cheering and rejoicing to be quit of you — 
by heaven! it was a ton's weight off the brig. 

Pew. 

Cap'n Gaunt, Cap'n Gaunt, these are ugly words. 
Gau.nt. 

What next ? You shipped with Flint the Pirate. 
What you did then I know not ; the deep seas have 
kept the secret ; kept it, ay, and will keep against 
the Great Day. God smote you with blindness, but 
you heeded not the sign. That was His last mercy ; 
look for no more. To your knees, man, and re- 
pent! Pray for a new heart ; flush out your sins 
with tears ; flee while you may from the terrors of 
the wrath to come. 

Pew. 
Now, I want this clear : Do I understand that 
you 're going back on me, and you '11 see me 
damned first ? 

Gaunt. 
Of me you shall have neither money nor strong 
drink ; not a guinea to spend in riot ; not a drop 
to fire your heart with devilry. 

Pew. 
Cap'n, do you think it wise to quarrel with me ? 
I put it to you now, Cap'n, fairly as between man 
and man — do you think it wise ? 

Gaunt. 

My feet are on the Rock. Be- 



I fear nothing. 
zone ! 



The play is full of speeches as beauti- 
ful as those I have just read you of 
Gaunt's; and if beautiful speeches, and 
even beautiful passages of dialogue, 



made a good drama, "Admiral Guinea" 
would indeed be a great success. But 
what chiefly strikes one after seeing or 
reading the play is that Stevenson's 
idea of dramatic writing was that fine 
speeches, and fine speeches alone, 
would carry everything before them. 
I can picture the collaborators sitting 
together and discussing the composi- 
tion of their work, and saying to each 
other, "This position, or that, will fur- 
nish a capital opportunity for a good 
speech" ; I can imagine Stevenson sub- 
sequently telling his friend what a 
splendid "speech" he had just written. 
In short, "Admiral Guinea" is mainly 
rhetoric, beautifully done but with no 
blood in it. The second act— the inn 
scene — is a monument of long-winded- 
ness; while the situation of Gaunt's 
walking in his sleep — by which Steven- 
son's friends and admirers, on tiie oc- 
casion of the production of the play in 
London, set such store — ^could be cut 
out of the drama bodily for any bearing 
it has upon the development of the 
story or the bringing about of the c/e- 
noiiement. I was a witness of the single 
performance of this piece in London 
and can testify to the ineffectiveness of 
its representation. 

In "Beau Austin" we have certainly 
Stevenson's nearest approach to an 
effective drama. In spite of its inac- 
ceptable theme, it is a chaiming play 
and really interesting on the stage. A 
little more careful handling of the last 
act might have rendered it wholly suc- 
ce.ssful. But still we see traces of the 
old crudity of technique of the toy- 
theatre, and still the author evidently 
conceived that the essence of the drama 
resides in rhetoric, in fine speeches. 
How artless, for instance, is the scene 
of exposition between the heroine's 
aunt. Miss Foster, and the maid, Bar- 
bara, in which half the time Miss Foster 
is telling Barbara things she knows per- 
fectly well already, and the other half 
saying things she would never have 
said to a maid. Then, when it comes 
to revealing to us the recesses of Dor- 
othy's heart, what do the authors 
do? They make her speak a solid page 
and a half of soliloquy — exquisitely 
composed, but, again, how rhetori- 



12 



The Critic 



cal, how undramatic ! So elegant is 
this soliloquy that I cannot refrain from 
murdering it for your benefit. You 
remember the position — Dorothy Mus- 
grave is hugging a terrible secret to her 
breast, her betrayal by George Fred- 
erick Austin, the "Beau Austin" of 
the play. She has just received a let- 
ter from John Fenwick, an old and 
faithful lover, and her aunt has been 
upbraiding the girl on account of her 
declared determination never to marry, 
Dorothy, left alone, says: 

Mow she tortures me, poor aunt, my poor blind 
aunt! and I — I could break her heart with a word. 
That she should see nothing, know nothing — there 's 
where it kills. O, it is more than' I can bear . . . 
and yet, how much less than I deserve! Mad girl, 
of what do I complain ? that this dear, innocent 
woman still believes me good, still pierces me to the 
soul with trustfulness. Alas! and were it other- 
wise, were her dear eyes opened to the truth, what 
were left me but death? He, too — she must still 
be praising him, and every word is a lash upon my 
conscience. If I could die of my secret: if I could 
cease — but one moment cease — this living lie ; if I 
could sleep and forget and be at rest! {She reads 
John Fenwick' s letter.) Poor John! He at least 
is guiltless ; and yet for my fault he too must suffer, 
he too must bear part in my shame. Poor John 
Fenwick! Has he come backVith the old story : 
with what might have been, perhaps, had we stayed 
by Edenside? Eden? Yes, my Eden, from which 
I fell. O my old north country, myxoid river — the 
river of my innocence, the old country of my hopes 
— how could I endure to look on you now ? And 
how to meet John? — John, with the old love on 
his lips, the old, honest, innocent, faithful heart? 
There was a Dorothy once who was not unfit to 
ride with him, her heart as light as his, her life as 
clear as the bright rivers we forded ; he called her 
his Diana, he crowned her .so with rowan. Where 
is that Dorothy now ? that Diana ? [she that was 
everything to John ? For, O, I [did him good ; I 
know I did him good ; I will still believe I did him 
good ; I made him honest and kind and a true 
man; alas, and could not guide myself ! And now, 
how will he despise me! For he shall know ; if I 
die, he shall know all ; I could not live, and not 
be true with him. 

She produces a necklace which she 
has discovered in the possession of the 
maid, a necklace with which the woman 
has been bribed by Beau Austin as an 
inducement to her to keep out of the 
way upon a certain occasion. Dorothy 
contemplates the trinket and says: 



That he .should have bought me from my maid! 
George, George, that you should have stooped to 
this! Basely as you have used me, this is the basest. 
Perish the witness! {She thro'ws the thing to the 
ground and treads on it.) Break, break like my 
heart, break like my hopes, perish like my good 
name! . 

Poorly as I render this soliloquy, you 
cannot, I think, fail to perceive its ex- 
treme gracefulness. Even finer, be- 
cause it is more naturally introduced, 
and therefore more dramatic, is an ear- 
lier speech of Dorothy's wherein she 
turns almost fiercely upon her aunt 
who has, in ignorance, been praising 
Beau Austin for his gallantries. 
"Stop ! " cries the girl. 

Aunt Evelina, stop! I cannot endure to hear 
you. What is he, after all, but just Beau Austin ? 
What has he done, with half a century of good health 
— what has he done that is either memorable or 
worthy ? Diced and danced and set fashions ; van- 
quished is a drawing-room, fought for a word ; 
what else? As if these were the meaning of life! 
Do not make me think so poorly of all of us women. 
Sure, we can rise to admire a better kind of man 
than Mr. Austin. We are not all to be snared with 
the eye, dear aunt ; and those that are — O! I know 
not whether I more hate or pity them. 

Ladies and gentlemen, it is not my 
intention to trouble you with any 
further extracts from this play. I 
should, I fear, lay myself open to a 
charge of unfairness by quoting scenes 
with the sole object of proving their 
ineffectiveness, even tediousness. I 
ask you to turn, at your leisure, to 
"Beau Austin " and to study the play 
for yourselves. I ask you to read the 
passages — some of them great pass- 
ages — of dialogue between Dorothy 
and Fenwick, between Fenwick and 
Beau Austin, between the Beau and 
Dorothy; and I submit to you that 
while there is much in these passages 
that is beautiful, much that is true and 
subtle, there is very little that is truly 
and subtly expressed. The beauty the 
authors aimed at was, 1 believe you 
will agree with me, the absolute beauty 
of words, such beauty as Ruskin or 
Pater or Newman might achieve in an 
eloquent passage, not the beauty of 
dramatic fitness to the character of the 
situation. 



Robert Louis Stevenson : The Dramatist 



13 



Now, I am not attacking — and I 
should be sorry if you so understood 
me — that poetical convention which 
reigns, for instance, in our gieat Eliza- 
bethan drama. I am not claiming any 
absolute and inherent superiority for 
our modern realistic technique, though 
I do not think it quite so inferior as 
some critics would have us believe. 
But what I do say is that the dramatist 
is bound to select his particular form 
of technique, master, and stick to it. 
He must not jumble up two styles and 
jump from one to the other. This is 
what the authors of "Beau Austin" 
have not realized. Their technique is 
neither ancient nor modern; their lan- 
guage is neither poetry nor prose — the 
prose, that is to say, of conceivable 
human life. The period has nothing 
to do with it. People spoke, no doubt, 
a little more formally in 1820 than they 
do to-day; but neither then nor at 
any time was the business of life, even 
in its most passionate moments, con- 
ducted in pure oratory. I say, then, 
that even in "Beau Austin," far su- 
perior though it be to his other plays, 
Stevenson shows that he had not 
studied and realized the conditions of 
the problem he was handling — the 
problem of how to tell a dramatic story 
truly, convincingly, and effectively on 
the modern stage — the problem of dis- 
closing the workings of the human 
heart by methods which shall not de- 
stroy the illusion which a modern au- 
dience expects to enjoy in the modern 
theatre. 

Perhaps you will tell me that the 
fault lay in some part, not with Steven- 
son, but with the modern audience. I 
do not maintain that an individual au- 
dience never makes mistakes, or even 
that the theatrical public in general is 
a miracle of high intelligence. But I 
assert unhesitatingly that the instinct 
by which the public feels that one form 
of drama, and not another, is what best 
satisfies its intellectual and spiritual 
needs at this period or at that is a 
natural and justified instinct. Fifty 
years hence the formula of to-day will 
doubtless be as antiquated and in- 
effective as the formula of fifty years 
ago; but it is imposed by a natural 



fitness upon the dramatist of to-day, 
just as, if he wants to travel long dis- 
tances, he must be content to take the 
railway train, and cannot either ride in 
a stage-coach or fly in an air-ship. As 
a personal freak, of course, he may fur- 
bish up a stage-coach, or construct — at 
his risk and peril — an air-ship. Such 
freaks occur in the dramatic world from 
time to time, and are often interesting 
— sometimes, but very rarely, success- 
ful. "Deacon Brodie " and "Admiral 
Guinea" are what I may perhaps de- 
scribe as stage-coach plays — deliberate 
attempts to revive an antiquated form. 
But "Beau Austin" is not even that. 
It is a costume play, I admit ; but its 
methods are fundamentally and essen- 
tially modern. The misfortune is that 
the authors had not studied and mas- 
tered the formula they were attempting 
to use, but were forever falling back, 
without knowing it, upon a bygone 
formula, wholly incongruous with the 
matter of their play and the manner in 
which alone it could be presented in 
the theatre of their day. 

Many authors, of course, have de- 
liberately written plays "for the 
study," ignoring — or more often, per- 
haps, affecting to ignore — the possi- 
bility of stage presentation. But this 
was not Stevenson's case; nor did he 
pretend that it was. Listen to this 
passage from Mr. Graham Balfour's 
charmingly written life of his cousin 
and friend : 

Meanwhile the first two months at Bournemouth 
were spent chiefly in the company of Mr. Henley 
and were devoted to collaboration over two new 
plays. The reception of " Deacon Brodie " had been 
sufficiently promising to serve as an incentive to 
write a piece which should be a complete success, 
and so to grasp some of the rewards which now 
seemed within reach of the authors. They had 
never affected to disregard the fact that in this 
country the prizes of the dramatist are out of all 
proportion to the payment of the man of letters ; 
and already in 1S83 Stevenson had written to his 
fatlier : " l"he tlieatre is the gold mine'; and on 
that I must keep an eye." 

Now let me recall to your mind, in this 
connection, the "mercantile delight" 
which Stevenson professes to have felt 
in the dream-drama enacted by the 



H 



The Critic 



"Brownies of his brain." How exactly 
that chimes in with his own remark to 
his father, and with his biographer's 
frank avowal of the motive which in- 
spired his collaboration with Mr. Hen- 
ley. Ladies and gentlemen, I am the 
last to pretend that it is a disgrace to 
an artist to desire an adequate, an 
ample pecuniary reward for his labors. 
That is not at all my point. 1 draw 
your attention to these passages for 
two reasons. Firstly because they put 
out of court, once for all, any conjec- 
ture that in play-writing Stevenson 
obeyed a pure artistic ideal, and had 
no taste or ambition for success on the 
stage. Secondly, I draw your atten- 
tion to them in order to indicate an 
unexpressed but clearly implied fallacy 
that underlies them. When Stevenson 
says, "The theatre is the gold mine," 
and when Mr. Graham Balfour tells us 
that Stevenson felt that "the prizes of 
the dramatist are out of all proportion 
to the payment of the man of letters," 
the implication obviously is that the 
gold mine can be easily worked, that 
the prizes are disproportionate to the 
small amount of pains necessary in 
order to grasp them. That was evi- 
dently the belief of these two men of 
distinguished talent ; and that was pre- 
cisely where they made the mistake. 
The art of drama, in its higher forms, 
is not, and can never be, easy ; nor are 
such rewards as fall to it in any way 
out of proportion to the sheer mental 
stress it involves. No amount of 
talent, of genius, will, under modern 
conditions at any rate, enable the dra- 
matist to dispense with a concentration 
of thought, a sustained intensity of 
mental effort, very different, if I may 
venture to say so, from the exertion 
demanded in turning out an ordinary 
novel. Stevenson's novels were not 
ordinary, and I do not for a moment 
imply that the amount of mental effort 
which produced, say, "The Master of 
Ballantrae," might not, if well directed, 
have produced a play of equal value. 
But Stevenson was never at the trouble 
of learning how to direct it well. On 
the contrary, he wholly ignored the 
necessity for so doing. What attracted 
him to the drama was precisely the 



belief that he ^could turn out a good 
play with far less mental effort than 
it co^ him to write a good novel; 
and here he was radically, wofully, in 
error. And the inadequate success of 
his plays, instead of bringing his mis- 
take home to him, merely led him, I 
am afraid, to contemn the artistic me- 
dium which he had failed to acquire. 

Towards the end of his life, while he 
was in Samoa, and years after his col- 
laboration with Mr. Henley had come 
to a close, it seems to have been sug- 
gested by his friends at home that he 
should once more try his hand at drama ; 
for we find him writing to Mr. Colvin : 
"No, 1 will not write a play for Irving, 
nor for the devil. Can you not see 
that the work of falsification which a 
play demands is of all tasks the most 
ungrateful? And I have done it a long 
while— and nothing ever came of it." 
It is true — it is fatally true — that he 
had devoted himself in his dramatic 
ventures to "the work of falsification" ; 
but that was, I repeat, because he mis- 
conceived entirely the problem before 
him. The art — the great and fascinat- 
ing and most difficult art — of the mod- 
ern dramatist is nothing else than to 
achieve that compression of life which 
the stage undoubtedly demands with- 
out falsification. If Stevenson had 
ever mastered that art — and I do not 
question that if he had properly con- 
ceived it he had it in him to master it 
— he might have found the stage a gold 
mine, but he would have found, too, 
that it is a gold mine which cannot be 
worked in a smiling, sportive, half- 
contemptuous spirit, but only in the 
sweat of the brain, and with every 
m.ental nerve and sinew strained to its 
uttermost. He would have known 
that no ingots are to be got out of this 
mine, save after sleepless nights, days 
of gloom and discouragement, and 
other days, again, of feverish toil, the 
result of which proves in the end to be 
misapplied and has to be thrown to 
the winds. When you sit in your stall 
at the theatre and see a play moving 
across the stage, it all seems so easy 
and so natural, you feel as though the 
author had improvised it. The char- 
acters, being, let us hope, ordinary 



Robert Louis Stevenson : The Dramatist 



15 



human beings, say nothing very re- 
markable, nothing, you think, — there- 
by paying the author the highest 
possible compliment,— that might not 
quite well have occurred ioyoii. When 
you take up a playbook (if ever you do 
take one up) it strikes you as being a 
very trifling thing — a mere insubstan- 
tial pamphlet beside the imposing bulk 
of the latest six-shilling novel. Little 
do you guess that every page of the 
play has cost more care, severer mental 
tension, if not more actual manual 
labor, than any chapter of a novel, 
though it be fifty pages long. It is 
the height of the author's art, accord- 
ing to the old maxim, that the ordinary 



spectator should never be clearly con- 
scious of the skill and travail that have 
gone to the making of the finished pro- 
duct. But the artist who would achieve 
a like feat must realize its difficulties, 
or what are his chances of success? 
Stevenson, with, all his genius, made 
the mistake of approaching the theatre 
as a toy to be played with. The facts 
of the case were against him, for the 
theatre is not a toy; and, facts being 
stubborn things, he ran his head against 
them in vain. Had he only studied 
the conditions, or, in other words got 
into a proper relation to the facts, with 
what joy should we have acclaimed him 
among the masters of the modern stage ! 



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